


transposition of emotional memory (it's just a few broken ribs)

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Series: Fools in Alleyways [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: AOU spoilers, Angst, M/M, Post-Series, Violence, alley fights, blind catholic ninjas, post-AoU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-25
Updated: 2015-05-25
Packaged: 2018-04-01 02:50:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4003030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Violence is the most primal source of emotional memory.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>(or: muscle memory is a bitch to us all)</p>
            </blockquote>





	transposition of emotional memory (it's just a few broken ribs)

**Author's Note:**

> THIS IS PROBABLY GARBAGE

Matt thinks that once upon a time, in the world of long-ago, which was a total of four or five years ago, the world made sense. The entire planet was made of possible things, like bad drivers and crooked cops and, who knows, puppies and kittens, too, because there had to be something good to mix with all the bad. But it was all in the realm of possibilities. There were no Norse Gods, no giant rage monsters, no sky over Manhattan opening up and dropping aliens on the entire city, and there was no whatever-it-was-that-destroyed-the-entire-nation-of-Sokovia.

The refugees are already starting to come over, pouring into the more unsavory corners of New York. Once upon a time, in Matt’s world of long-ago, that’s what Hell’s Kitchen was supposed to be; a place to start a life in New York. Maybe not the safest neighborhood but full of people who worked hard, who lived lives cleaning floors or washing dishes or picking up trash in Central Park. 

In the not-so-long-ago, things started to improve, too quickly, snowballing. The sound of Hell’s Kitchen changed from families to galleries, and then the sky opened, and everything went-

-well.

Matt doesn’t dress like a devil because it’s how he gets his kicks.

(Well, _he does_ , but that isn’t the _only reason_.)

Sokovian is more like Bulgarian than it is like Russian, though Matt’s Russian is still rudimentary, generally only good enough to ask if someone was hurt, his Bulgarian was actually better, so Sokovian isn’t totally outside his realm of understanding, which is good. Most of the people just want to get over whatever it was that happened - Matt hears a lot of _Captain America_ and _Iron Man_ and occasionally someone mutters something about some twins - but like any group of people, there are those who learn quickly that Hell’s Kitchen is open for violence as an enterprise, too.

That’s why he’s in this alley, getting his ass mostly handed to him by an absolutely furious Sokovian man with at least two knives (Matt hears the telltale silver jingle of a third one, fastened against the man’s belt, how many knives does one thug need? God, why are these assholes getting so specialized?) trying not to ruminate on how he is a trained (blind) warrior, basically, so what is it about fat men powered by rage that makes them so impossible to just stop?

He takes a punch to the shoulder, and then one to the face, and the one to the face actually sends him skidding down the alley, crashing into something. He gets up when someone - _something_ , someone heavy (it lands like it’s made of stone) drops in front of him, and Matt adjusts, ready to go, but-

Christ, Christ almighty, the gunshot is so sharp that Matt actually recoils, uncertain for a moment. What the hell is it in front of him? It’s shaped like a person, he can hear something like a heartbeat, but then where the blood should be going into a shoulder there’s nothing, just the grinding of metal and _Christ_ , he can hear the Sokovian man sobbing, sobbing, and he heads a voice, low and gravely and pitched so normal people wouldn’t be able to hear _growl_ something in Sokovian, something about _someone_ and _size_ and then a word that might be flower, or it might be _punk_ , and there’s a punch and crack and Matt is left with a man whose breathing is wet and ragged, and from all that Matt can tell, whose nose is almost entirely _gone_.

The other man, the weapon, he’s gone, so fast and so smoothly that even Matt can’t tell where he went.

~~~~~

Foggy is at the office when Matt gets there the next morning, coffee in his blessed, innocent, completely blood-free hand. “Three meetings,” he says, brightly, “three! Three blessed meetings! Do you know what this means?”

“Coffee?” Matt asks, reaching his hand out, and Foggy graciously turns the cup over.

“It means I’m eating _steak_ tonight,” Foggy says, and then he’s dancing, which Matt is grateful he’s blind for because even just the way he moves in space is awkward. 

(Matt is smiling, he knows he’s smiling, he’ll smile forever if Foggy just dances like that, like joy.)

(He would rather be buried alive than admit this.)

“Don’t get too carried away, they might not be billable,” Matt reminds him gently as he makes his way towards his office.

Foggy follows. “Don’t,” he starts, “don’t get rational, after the Fisk mess and everything that happened in the last couple of months, not to mention the Sokovian invasion and how that’s making the cops get jumpy about ‘the damn Russians’-” Foggy stops for a second and makes a noise, because he _hates_ it when people lump all the Eastern Europeans together, Foggy has very strong opinions in places no one expects him to, “-and how that firm on the Upper West Side keeps sniping all the cases with actual prospects, we need _not-rational_ Matt. Can we see him for a while?”

“Sure,” Matt says, a little distracted. He’s still thinking about the guy from last night. He’s still thinking about how he dropped in, how Matt didn’t know he was there until he was, how-

He keeps replaying it in his head, but nothing changes. It was the first time in a long time that Matt actually felt blind.

~~~~~

Another night, another alley, another person, seemingly fueled by something that turns them into an unstoppable machine with the ability to find the chinks in Matt’s armor. There’s no knife this time, but Matt does get a fist to the ribs - he feels the crack and he thinks, shit, Claire is still gone - and another one to the kidneys so brutally strong he knows he’ll be pissing blood.

Still. He sways up and down and doesn’t think about his life choices. Instead he thinks about how this guy is peddling women like they’re drugs, about how they cry, about how he hits them, and he spins and turns and grunts as the pain from the punches lances up his side, but this time he avoids getting a fist to the face. He lands heavily, and something metal shifts under him-

(it’s the lid of a trash can, he realizes)

-and he picks it up and throws it.

There is a reason that blind men usually do not throw things and expect it to land where it’s meant to, but Matt is, generally, the exception to the rule, so when the clang of the metal hits the wall he swears and picks himself up, thinking he missed, thinking he’s going to get another punch.

But no, the man is gone, just _gone_ , like something plucked him out of the alley and airlifted him to safety.

An hour later, Matt finds the guy. It wasn’t to safety. He’s in the water, in the river, his lungs half-filled with water. He wheezes something when Matt pushes against his heart, and after Matt asserts that the asshole will live, he parses it together.

_A metal arm?_

~~~~~

He’s feeling distinctly bruised and banged, and a little stiff when Karen hands him a stack of braille documents the next day. There is still something subdued in her - she’s better, she’s been better, but she’s still not quite right. It’s the guilt, flooding the space around her. Matt knows guilt, he knows it better than anyone might assume.

“You look exhausted,” she tells him, and presses a very absent hand against his head. He moves his head, looks up to where she isn’t quite - it’s the details that sell blindness, it’s the details that keep people from looking at him like he’s too uncanny - and she mutters, “You need to get more sleep.”

“You’re probably right,” he tells her, but now he can’t. There’s someone out there in Hell’s Kitchen. And maybe they’re not dangerous, but there is something about this that bothers Matt. Sure, his fights aren’t quiet, but they’re at two or three in the morning, when everyone else with any shred of sanity is long asleep, or at least tucked away at home.

She presses her hand there again, and he wishes he knew what her face really looked like, he wishes he could tell if she’s smiling. “If those circles around your eyes get any darker, people are going to think you’re the Washington Bomber.”

Matt goes still a second. First off, he didn’t know that the Washington Bomber had bags under his eyes - Foggy had neglected to mention that when he and Matt spent the better part of a week watching the footage unroll from when the man had destroyed half of D.C. in what seemed to Matt to be a ploy to get Captain America’s attention away from SHIELD - but more importantly, he remembers _it looks like the dude has a metal arm._

The descriptions came in over and over. There was a blurry picture or two, a shot taken by a telephoto lens belonging to a parapazzi who was in town stalking Jennifer Lawrence, and a satellite shot that Tony Stark, of all people, had released, but none of that mattered to Matt. He had been too worried about his bar exams, not some killer in D.C. who was probably a rogue SHIELD agent anyway. Captain America was on the case.

Now he knows that Captain America is depressed Catholic who up until very recently was spending every Wednesday in the confessional of Matt’s church, reciting a litany of sins, maybe he shouldn’t be so complacent about it. 

But none of that matters. “He had a metal arm, right?” Matt asks, taking a moment to aim his face away from Karen, feeling for the stack of thick papers she left on his desk, slightly annoyed he has to pretend, but knowing that’s just part of the agreement he has with the entire world. 

“The Washington Bomber? Karen asks, to clarify, and then she quickly adds, “That’s what the anchors said, but who knows with SHIELD.” There is something bitter in her tone, like she’s lost the ability to trust the media, and Matt understands it. She goes to the door. “You let me know if you need anything.”

Once she leaves, Matt stands, grabs his cane, and goes for a walk.

~~~~~

Despite everything he’s done, the Washington Bomber - if it was him, Matt is beginning to doubt - doesn’t show up again. He can’t seem to find him, either. He sits on top of buildings and listens for something, anything, the grinding of gears (too general, the way that his arm had whirred is replicated on a louder scale in twenty different machine shops lining the inside roadways of Hell’s Kitchen) and during his fights recently, he hasn’t had a drop in, not even once.

The longer things go on without the Washington Bomber dropping by, the longer Matt thinks that maybe he’s really just making it up in his head. Maybe the guy didn’t have an arm and he misunderstood the pimp (no, he had something resembling an arm) or maybe it was a different man. Matt hasn’t heard anything about people getting attacked - well, nothing systematic, nothing _out of the ordinary_ , which is depressing but at the very least normal - and he hasn’t heard anything about a man with a metal arm.

But then, that isn’t surprising either. Clearly the guy can hide that, because even though it’s not cold out anymore, lots of people wear long sleeves for a lot of reasons. Or gloves. Or maybe this is New York, and the people who see him speak Mandarin or Greek or, who knows, _Sokovian_ , and Matt just doesn’t understand them gossiping about the asshole with the metal arm using his cell phone in the bodega.

A pair of weeks go by, and for a few days things are so quiet that Matt finally does manage to get some sleep, which is why when the three gang members who he manages to herd into an alley because they’re selling something that Matt’s never smelled before manage to get the drop on him, figuratively speaking, he almost feels like he’s back in those first few days of this vigilante justice crusade. One of them manages to shoot him in the leg, and Matt’s quick enough to that it only slice about a quarter inch of skin off, but it hurts like a _bitch_ and gives the guys time to gang up on him.

He starts fighting then like an animal. One of them gets gouged by a horn (he likes them more and more, these little devil horns on his mask) but the guy slams Matt into a wall, and Matt can hear his ribs crack like dominos crashing, and then the pain, glorious and stunning all at once, takes his breath away.

He’s trying to figure out how to breathe and hoping to god he can finish these guys off, but then one of them slams his head against the wall and his ability to hear them goes on the fritz, and he goes cold with uncertainty. The world around him dims and ebbs and flares up as he tries to reconfigure his senses, so he misses the end of the fight, the three guys getting tossed like rag dolls the only part his brain can seem to grasp.

“I had them on the ropes,” Matt manages, huffing, falling into someone’s arms, his skull sending him shooting whiteness and flared up darkness.

“I know you did,” that someone replies, and Matt blesses the silence.

~~~~

He wakes up and he doesn’t know where he is, but that’s both hardly new and not alarming. Wherever he is, it’s dry and warm, and when he reaches down to his leg he can feel where the bullet wound has been patched up. 

“You’re not him,” someone says. His voice is dark and familiar.

Matt assesses the rest of his body. His ribs hurt like hell - god he wishes he were at Claire’s - and his head is pounding, but on the whole it’s not as bad as it could be. “You’re the Washington Bomber,” Matt states, without accusation, just like a fact. Like he’s saying it’s raining out (which it is, Matt notes, grateful for the fact that the tinnitus from the blow to the head has only lasted as long as this).

There’s a shuffling sort of noise, and the man is moving closer. His heartbeat is like a drum, pound, pound, pound. It’s funny because it’s so familiar, the rhythm of it, the way it slams. Matt’s heard this rhythm before, but he can’t quite place it. His head is loopy. “I thought I knew you,” the Washington Bomber says. “It was memory.” There is something indescribably painful about that, as if memory is the worst thing it could be.

“They’re going to keep looking for you. The police,” Matt adds, “so if you-”

“They won’t find me,” the Bomber assures him. “You need to stay out of alleys. You’re going to get killed. Or do you have to run into every fight you see?”

The Brooklyn accent is very slight, but it’s persistent now, exasperated. “Why did you save me?” Matt asks.

“It was memory,” the man says again, and Matt realizes the pain is not because memory is the worst thing, but the thing he hoped it would be. 

“What are you missing?” Matt is beginning to feel like this is the most awkward interrogation he’s ever participated in; the man doesn’t move, not a single inch, he’s still like he’s made of metal, but he’s not, Matt can hear that pounding, like a sledgehammer, like a jackhammer. His heart beats like it’s trying to tell the world he’s there. “How can I help you?”

“I thought he came back for me,” the man says, softly, quietly, and Matt has heard that tone before. In the abandoned, the hopeless, the people who had put their faith on someone else, but that faith drowned in despair. “I don’t know why he stopped.”

“Stopped?”

There’s silence, then. “I’m not the Washington Bomber,” he says. “It wasn’t me.”

His heart beats steadily, without a hitch. He isn’t lying. “You have a metal arm,” Matt points out, because there is something strange happening here.

“It wasn’t me,” the man insists, and finally he moves. “Stay out of alleys. Or you’re going to die in one, punk.”

Matt gets up, but his body protests, and the man is whole and hale and gone before Matt can do anything about it. He sits there in the cold, and decides to hell with it, and calls Foggy.

Foggy picks him up twenty minutes later, and yells at him the whole way home, and it’s the most comforting thing Matt’s heard in a long time.

~~~~

It’s drums.

Drums in Central Park - one of those drumming circles. It’s been almost a week and Matt can’t stop thinking of the man with the metal arm; he goes into alleys but short of getting the shit kicked out of himself, which he’s not going to let happen just to attract attention, which proves that there are things Matt won’t let himself get beaten up for, he doesn’t hear or see him again.

He’s sitting in the park and the drums are beating in the distance - they must be up near Strawberry Fields, that’s far - and the _thud, thud, thud_ reminds him of Steve Roger’s heartbeat, that offensively healthy screaming his heart did, and that’s what does it, that’s what slots things into place. 

Matt begins to laugh, suddenly, the maniacal laughter of someone who is utterly and impossibly perplexed by the sheer and utter madness that has wound it’s way into his life. The infinite number of coincidences, the impossibilities of the last few years, clearly delineating before and after.

Because Matt knows enough to know this: he was not the only person in alleyways in the past few weeks, looking for something. There have been three of them, constant, but one disappeared. 

They’re all looking for something, but two of them are looking for each other.

He knows the sound of Bucky Barnes’ heart, beating somehow, with the same rhythm, impossible and improbable and utterly sure, slamming against his ribs, matching Steve Rogers so completely and so utterly that it couldn’t be anyone else.

Matt considers the world today: there is a new impossible thing every single moment of every single day. Monsters and aliens and (apparently) evil robots, countries being wiped off the map, the most terrifying miracles, and he wonders if it’s foolishness to hope for a good one, as impossible as it seems, as impossible as it must be.

**Author's Note:**

> whatever I'm a disaster, but the reception to as the lord is my shepherd (you're still in the dumpster) was really good (thank you, I'm floored!!!) I thought I would write this follow up. This probably concludes this tiny little series! But thank you for all your comments and feedback and kudos, they provided me with many tears of actual joy


End file.
